


Fire on Fire

by DoreyG



Category: Blake & Avery Series - M. J. Carter
Genre: Caretaking, Injured Ribs, M/M, Treatment Of Injury Leads To Inconvenient Arousal In Injured Party, [Blank] to Lovers - A has conflicting feelings while B tenderly treats his/her injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24141562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoreyG/pseuds/DoreyG
Summary: “I don’t need you to nursemaid me,” he was still saying in irritation, because ofcoursehe was, as I swiftly preceded him up the stairs to his rooms and unlocked the door. “I’mfine, William, there’s really no need to fret.”
Relationships: William Avery/Jeremiah Blake
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	Fire on Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



I was worried about Blake. This was hardly a new sensation, I was always worried about Blake in some way or another, but I had genuine cause this time. We had been tangentially involved in another riot, and by tangentially I meant had directly caused it to provide a cover for our exit of the situation, and in escaping it Blake had been slammed into by a man even bigger than me and thrown up against a stone wall. He’d been subtly clutching his ribs ever since, wincing every time he moved a little too sharply.

“I don’t need you to nursemaid me,” he was still saying in irritation, because of _course_ he was, as I swiftly preceded him up the stairs to his rooms and unlocked the door. “I’m _fine_ , William, there’s really no need to fret.”

I gave him an incredulous glance over my shoulder, held the door open for him and only narrowly resisted the urge to put my arms around him and guide him as he walked through. “You say that, and yet you look on the point of collapse. Would it really hurt, to let me check your injuries?”

“You aren’t a doctor, so it may well,” he retorted. Which was a low blow, but showed that he was too dazed to repress his natural level of acid and so rather proved my point. He didn’t sit down when he entered the room, because that would’ve been too sensible, but instead just stood in the centre of the space and glared at me reprovingly. “I think I know how to treat my own injuries by now, William, you really should leave me be.”

“Your idea of treating your own injuries is to ignore them, and then dramatically collapse several days down the line,” I told him, not opposed to a few low blows of my own if he was going to be as stubborn as that. “For heaven’s sake, Jeremiah, sit down. I’ll just take a look, to satisfy myself that it’s nothing serious, and then I’ll go on my way and leave you to wallow in your own stubbornness.”

He glared at me for a moment more, and I felt a mild surge of alarm as I noticed that he was starting to sway on his feet. “You will not. You’ll say that you intend to leave, and then you’ll still be here two hours later attempting to feed me soup or something equally foolish.”

“Jeremiah, for the love of…” I narrowly bit my tongue on an oath, finally abandoned the polite approach and marched over to fetch one of the rickety old chairs from his sad excuse for a dining table. “What if I promised not to feed you soup? Would that stop you from being ridiculous, just for a few minutes?”

“If it isn’t soup, it’ll be stew,” Blake murmured darkly, _ridiculously_ , but was too weak to resist me. He sunk down into the chair I’d placed down behind him resentfully, giving me a rather grim look as he did so. “William… You really don’t have to worry, you know. I’ll be absolutely fine by myself, I have been many times before.”

“Yes, but you had to be by yourself before,” I said, and sunk down before him to loosely - intimately - clasp his hands in my own. “You don’t have to be now, Jeremiah. You don’t have to struggle on by yourself, desperately pushing everybody else away, because I’m here for you. I’m always here for you.”

He stared at me for a long moment, his face unreadable. And then gave a heavy sigh, and glanced away from me in a reluctant surrender. “Fine. Do as you will.”

It was hardly the most enthusiastic assent, but you learned to take what you could get with Blake. I immediately leaned up on my heels and in, ready to divest him of his clothing so I could look at the problem more thoroughly.

I hooked my fingers under his waistcoat, if you could even call such a battered and ratty thing a waistcoat anymore, and carefully unbuttoned the front. I urged him forwards, with some effort because he was still hardly a pliant partner in this process, and slid it down over his arms and tossed it to his battered settee.

He was tense under my fingertips already. Which was expected, but still hurt an obscure part of my heart anyway. We had known each other for years and yet Blake still always tensed up when I went to touch him, always seemed to shy away from any serious physical contact. It was just the way that he was, but as somebody who wished to touch the man all the time it still rankled in a way that I couldn’t quite prevent.

It was best not to focus, on the many ways that I wanted to touch Blake. I got started on his shirt instead, the garment only a little less battered than the waistcoat that’d covered it. I undid the few buttons at the top, trying not to focus too much on the springy chest hair that I could feel under my fingertips, and then tugged the bottom free from his trousers and drew the whole lot over his head and tossed it to the settee too.

Blake downright attempted to jerk away from me, when I went near the waistband of his trousers, but his movement was arrested by my position crouched before him and so he only briefly rocked the rickety chair instead. When I glanced up at him, annoyed at what I saw as an attempt to injure himself even further, he only stared down at me with pressed together lips and a strangely unreadable look in his eye. It was like he was trying to hide something from me. Perhat how repulsive he found my touch.

I tried not to focus on that, tried not to let any of my multiple complex feelings at Blake shying away from me show, and mercifully it was easy with Blake’s bare chest in front of me. I had not found him particularly attractive, when we had met all those years ago in India, but time had worked wonders. I now couldn’t help my eyes from greedily drinking in the wiry hair on his chest, the old scars littered across his skin, the slight pucker of his nipples and…

“Is the examination over now?” Blake asked, in a slightly strangled voice, and jerked me reluctantly back to reality as he ever did. “Good. I don’t know why you tossed my shirt so far away, now I have to go-”

Of course. I wasn’t here to leer at Blake, as much as the temptation was always there, but rather to help him, Whatever was I thinking.

“Sit down,” I snapped, perhaps a little rougher than I otherwise would’ve been, and gently pushed him back into the chair when he stubbornly tried to rise. “That was just a preliminary look, to see if there was any obvious damage. You’ve looked after me before, you _know_ that I’ll have to go far more in depth than that.”

I gave his chest another brusque look over, focusing on the task in hand this time instead of just how much I - reluctantly, disbelievingly, helplessly - lusted after Blake. He didn’t look that injured, thank god, but there was a faint discolouration around the ribs of his left side that I didn’t like.

He grumbled under even that brief perusal, and shifted restlessly. I could feel his eyes intense upon the crown of my head, thankfully not noticing the true train of my thoughts but still watching me so closely that I half feared melting underneath the force of it.

Steeling myself against his obvious dislike of this process, his obvious dislike of our intimacy, I moved in for a closer look. There was definitely the beginnings of a puffy bruise there. It was too early to tell whether it would be serious or not, for now it was just a faint reddening of the skin, but I didn’t like the sight of it or how early it’d appeared. I wasn’t a doctor, if anything I was the exact opposite, but I’d seen enough injuries on the battlefield to have some wariness.

Blake had stiffened when I’d shuffled in closer, and now was quite obviously barely stopping himself from moving once again. His knees were clenched together, his hands were wrapped around the arms of the chair in what could only be described as a death grip. Tension radiated from every single inch of him, which was hardly the most flattering reaction I’d ever had to my presence.

I narrowly held back a sigh, well aware that it’d only come out melancholy and raise more questions than I knew how to deal with, and reached out to touch instead of just hovering at a near distance and prolonging a process that was loathsome to him. I brushed my fingers over his tender flesh, trying to catalogue whether it was causing him active pain at this very moment.

At my slightest touch, at the briefest tentative brush of my fingertips, he froze solid. This state lasted for a horrible moment, because the thought of bringing Blake any kind of discomfort was honestly anathema to me, and then became somehow worse. Blake slowly started to shift under me, genuinely started to _fidget_ in his seat like he was actively trying to wriggle away from my slightest touch.

I had never had anybody so reluctant to be near me that they’d tried to scramble away before, let alone the man I cared most for in the world. I couldn’t help myself, I glared up at him and then dug my fingers into his side in a motion that I tried to make businesslike but instead made slightly desperate. I wanted him to see me, I wanted him to acknowledge my presence, I wanted… I wanted to make sure that he was okay, to get over myself and remove my apparently awful touch from him as soon as possible.

He whimpered at the press of my fingers, but it was hardly the most pained whimper that I’d ever heard. He stared down at me for a long moment, a strange flush upon his face, and then drew in a deep breath and started to desperately fidget again. It was as if he was trying to adjust himself, as if he was trying to get into a position where we had to touch each other as little as possible.

It was awful. More than that, it was impossible for me to do my self imposed job when Blake was moving around in such a way. I was able to get the briefest grip on his skin, able to just guess that his ribs were mercifully largely intact underneath, but no more than that before my fingers were skidding recklessly on his moving body. I glared up at him, finally willing to show just how irritated I was, and tried to shift with the movements of his body. Tried to roll with him, to get a better grip on his side, to hold him down so we could both get this over with as soon as possible.

And in the process my elbow slipped, sagged down briefly into the space between his legs where he, the Blake that I’d thought loathed my very slightest touch, was…

 _Oh_.

Blake was hard, hard enough that I could feel it with only the briefest brush of my elbow. I jerked back from him instinctively, aware that I’d unthinkingly crossed a line, and stared up at him with wide eyes. For his part he stared back at me just as uncertainly, colour high in his cheeks and the panicked look of a rat in a trap spreading across his face.

It occured to me that he feared my reaction; worried, perhaps reasonably, that I would behave as any stupid young buck would do when faced with such a dilemma and resort to violence. It occured to me in the next moment that the most sensible way past this would be a polite denial: an awkward acknowledgement, a reassurance that I would not allow this to taint our relationship in future and a quick return to business.

Unfortunately, I no longer felt like being sensible. The flush on Blake’s cheeks had taken any chance of that away. I reached out again, barely tentative, and deliberately placed my hand over his cock instead. With my hand I could feel that he was half hard, but quickly getting to full mast. He felt not too long, but very thick and perfectly capable of splitting a man like me open. He gasped when I touched him, involuntarily, and his hips jerked as if he was desperately straining to hold himself back but couldn’t quite manage it. It was, to be perfectly frank, one of the most erotic experiences of my life.

And then Blake’s hand came down like a vice around my wrist, and I was forced to release him just briefly. When I looked up at him his eyes were blazing and that strange flush was still high on his cheeks. “Don’t do that.”

“Jeremiah…” I tried, not entirely sure if I should shame-facedly apologise or desperately plead.

“Don’t touch me if you’re not entirely serious,” he continued, mercifully solving that dilemma for me like he’d solved so many others over the years. “Because if you touch me again, like that… I’m not sure that I’ll be able to stop.”

I considered this. Saw, with a faint flash of annoyance, that Blake really didn’t believe that I was serious. That he still half thought, or maybe even mainly thought, that this was just some obscure way to mock him or some game I was playing. He had been so ill used by the world, so tortured over so many years, that he couldn’t see an obvious thing when it was right in front of him.

I shook my hand free, rather deliberately, and stared at him coolly for a moment or so. And then, free of his restraining grip, I slid it right back between his thighs and laid it over his cock again.

There was a frozen moment of silence with our faces so close, a moment in which I wondered if Blake would just deny himself and shove me away anyway. But then he let out a desperate groan, one that I felt right down in my gut, and reached out for me with grasping hands. The kiss that he yanked me into was the most desperate one that I’ve ever experienced.

I had imagined kissing Blake before, of course. Many times, and in so many ways; furtively when I was still pretending that I had no attraction to men, wistfully when he walked away from me again and again, desperately when I was alone in my bed at night… But somehow all those fantasies couldn’t match up to the glorious reality of it. His lips were warm on mine, and demanding in the best possible way. His tongue slipped into my mouth, and I allowed it with a certain feeling of giddy glee. By the way he clutched me, the way he ravaged my mouth without breath or pause, he had been longing for this just as much as I had.

My hand skidded away from his cock, because if I’d kept it there I would’ve exerted a pressure that would’ve ended things almost immediately, and landed safely on his warm side. My other hand initially grasped the back of the chair for support, and then I deliberately unclenched it and slid it into his overlong hair. I tilted his head back and claimed his mouth even more deeply, and revelled in the feeling of his skin against mine.

He seemed just as eager, if that was even possible. His hands had initially been clenched in the front of my shirt, desperately yanking me in, but after a while they eased. They slowly shifted sideways, rubbing over my nipples through the fabric in a way that made me gasp into his mouth, and came around until they could clutch at my back instead. This had the side effect of yanking me more fully onto him, which was hardly something that either of us protested.

My feet left the floor, and I shifted awkwardly until I could get my knees comfortably up onto the chair. I ended up straddling him as we continued to kiss, my knees either side of his thighs and our hips an inch away from being pressed together. Well, to my mind there was no need to waste such an advantage. I lowered myself slightly and ground down against him; at first slowly, testingly, and then with significantly more enthusiasm as he growled into my mouth and rolled his hips up in turn.

It was one of the best experiences of my life. It was wonderful, astonishing, one of the best things that I’d ever experienced. It was everything that I’d ever wanted, better than even the wildest of my dreams. It was…

Deeply unwise to do, on a rickety dining chair.

The chair had been creaking loudly, a fact that we’d both cheerfully enjoyed in the midst of our passion, but when I finally started to get into a proper rhythm of rolling my hips down against him it obviously decided that it’d had enough. It swayed back onto its hind legs for a moment, warningly. And then, inevitably under the weight of two grown men helplessly distracted by better things, fell all the way backwards with a loud creak.

We thumped to the floor in a tangle of limbs and chair, getting painfully caught up in each other in the most humiliating of ways. I landed heavily, jarring my knee, but luckily felt little more than winded. Blake landed underneath me, with my full weight on top of him, and let out an entirely uncharacteristic yelp as his ribs were jolted by the impact.

...Shit, his _ribs_.

“I’m an idiot,” I said in the most heartfelt way possible, one I’d got enough of my breath back to talk, and propped myself up on my elbows to better examine the man underneath me. The man who I’d mauled with my lust, when I _should_ have been making sure he wasn’t injured in some vital way. “Jeremiah, are you okay? Did I hurt you? Are you-?”

Blake was _laughing_. I had seen him laugh perhaps once before, in all the years of knowing and loving him, but the sight was unmistakable. His chest was heaving, his eyes were sparkling and his face was bright in a way that made him look several decades younger. I always found him handsome, was often distracted by just how attractive he was, but like this he was absolutely stunning. I was utterly spellbound, bewitched in the best possible way.

“I’m guessing that answers my question,” I said eventually, once I’d managed to get past gawping at him in the most awestruck manner possible. “You’re okay?”

“Yes, William, I’m perfectly fine,” he said, his tone gently mocking, and untangled his arms enough to reach for me again with demanding hands. “Now, are you really the type of person to let a collapsing chair get in the way of this?”

“No, but I am the type of person to let your potential severe injuries get in the way of taking my pleasure like some fool,” I said sternly, and caught his wrists in my hands. He didn’t protest, as I gently pinned him to the floor, but his eyes did sparkle in that teasing way that I loved so well. “We can wait a while. We’ve managed four years, after all.”

“William…” he stared at me with surprisingly vulnerable eyes for a long few moments, and then gave a breathtaking smile and shifted his hands until he could wrap his fingers carefully around mine. “I suppose you’re right. Will you kiss me again, at least?”

There was a risk there, an undeniable risk of us both getting carried away again like idiots… But he was still smiling up at me, and his ribs seemed largely fine, and I was so very tired of holding myself back for no apparent reason. I smiled down at him, in turn, and lowered my head to press our lips back together. And as our tongues met again, I knew what it was like to experience bliss.


End file.
